Cloud technology is driving change and accelerating digital transformation across multiple industries simultaneously. According to Marilyn Moodley, the South African Country Leader for SoftwareONE, Not only is cloud technology itself evolving at pace in Africa, but the way organisations buy and manage software is having to adapt as well.
In our previous Africa cloud review article, we highlighted how cloud services have certainly revolutionized the way African enterprises conduct their businesses, offering various benefits such as cost-effective access to computing power, on-demand applications, and services among others.
Recent data presented by TradingPlatforms.com, global public IT cloud services market revenue for 2020 also shows how the cloud industry earned an estimated revenue of over $300 billion globally. To be precise, the revenue was at $312.4B – a 34% Increase from 2019.
In 2016, the data shows that global spending on public IT cloud services was just under $100B. In 2021 that figure has ballooned to a healthy $312.4B after experiencing a 34% increase from 2019’s $233.4B revenue. In the 4 year period from 2016-2020 revenue from spending on cloud services grew at an impressive compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 36.31%.
The data shows how big the cloud market is. In continents like Africa for example, Hybrid cloud is providing enterprises with a trusted and capable foundation to adapt to changing market needs. As Tonny Tugee the MD at SEACOMEast Africa notes, today, businesses around the world are relying increasingly on connectivity for conducting business transactions and payments, running apps and services in cloud environments, marketing, or simply sharing information with each other.
This also explains why companies like Google are going big on cloud in Africa with Google cloud. With 24 regions and 73 zones in 17 countries, Google Cloud delivers high-performance, low-latency cloud services to customers with partners like Incentro Africa. A couple of weeks ago, Google announced it will be offering Android and cloud development scholarships to developers across Africa. Last week, it also announced a new partnership with Shopify, a global commerce company to enable Shopify’s more than 1.7 million merchants to have access to Google Cloud’s technology across a broader set of regions.
With increasing connectivity and availability of reliable and cheap internet across Africa, it has changed the way people work. Cloud is a leapfrog technology, comparable to the introduction of the mobile phone and we are just at the beginning of it.
Simon Ngunjiri Muraya is Google Cloud Architect at Incentro Africa.
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